Victorian Rock 'n' Roll Guitar Heroes
Joelf's niece recently married her college sweetheart in New Orleans. I'm told it was a very humid and sweet ceremony, but her side of the family was a little underrepresented. Most of her extended family and their friends live up here in Oregon, Washington, and Montana. So this weekend, they rented a lovely house on the beach in Lincoln City and hosted a Pacific Northwest reception for all of their friends and family. Joelf's sister, the mother of the bride, asked if I would make a cake for the reception. In the shape of a guitar, to go with the Victorian Rock 'n' Roll theme of the wedding.
Mkay...
June 28, 2007
Name of cake: Hey We Made a Guitar!
Occasion: Scarlett and Hunter Tied the Knot
Constituents: Two Half-Sheets of Red Velvet Cake, filled and frosted with vanilla "butter"cream frosting, cut and arranged in the shape of an electric guitar
First off, Joelf helped me with this project every step of the way. I couldn't have done it without his help, so thank you Joelf!! We are awesome!
Since the wedding theme was Victorian rock 'n' roll, the wedding colors were red and black, and the groom as well as the wedding and where they met and live is the South, it seemed obvious that the cake had to be red velvet.
I gave Joelf the task of finding a nice graphic of an electric guitar and printing it out--preferably as big as the cake would be. He found a pretty good photo that we needed to enlarge just a little bit, but it was good.
I hoofed it over to my favorite cake place, the Decorette shop, to buy a half sheet pan (12x18x2). The ladies over there may not be the friendliest ladies ever, but they sure are knowledgeable. My gruff lady helper reminded me that a full sheet pan wouldn't fit in my oven (I asked if they carried any), told me that the pan I was holding requires 3 boxes of mix and serves 80 people if we cut 1 inch by 2 inch slices.
Over the next few days we also bought from the Decorette store:
I also put Joelf on the task to round up a scrap piece of lace. More on that in a minute.
When the gruff lady told me that the pan would hold 3 boxes of mix, I thought about exactly how much cake batter I could possibly be creating from scratch...A LOT. That's a lot of potential ECL meltdowns. Since I already bought fake frosting, why not? Why not buy cake mix from a box??
So that's what I did--I bought 6 boxes of cake mix. And it was on sale!
However, nobody in Portland carries Red Velvet cake mix anymore. Luckily, I happened upon a copy of The Cake Mix Doctor while shopping and looked up Red Velvet cake...she suggested using a German Chocolate cake mix, and adding to it 1 cup sour cream, 1/4 cup oil, 1/2 cup water, 3 eggs, 1 bottle red food coloring, and 1 tsp vanilla extract. Excellent.
Joelf asked me to bake up the cakes on Thursday while he was at work and I wasn't. No problem!
I looked at my cute little KitchenAid and decided it was too small to mix all three boxes at once...so I mixed 2 boxes in one stage, moved it to another big bowl, mixed the last box, added it to the big bowl, and hand mixed in the food coloring. I wished for an electric hand mixer, because with one of those nifty appliances I could have mixed all 3 mixes plus the food coloring in one fell swoop in the big bowl and saved some time, plus some shoulder and arm pain. Oy, my aching shoulder!
Rose recommends baking a 12x18 pan for 35-45 minutes, so off the first layer went and I began to clean up. Annmarie and I were going to the Death Cab For Cutie show in about 90 minutes--I had to get the next round of cake mix ready and I was starting to panic about getting the cake done before I left for the show. I got all the ingredients readied for the second round and got myself ready too.
The first cake came out after about 40 minutes and I set it to cool. I suspected that with such a giant cake it would need more than 10 minutes to cool enough before it would be safe to take it out of the pan, but I wanted to get the second layer's batter in that freakin pan now. As soon as 10 minutes passed I hauled the cake out, and it didn't fall, but it certainly looked a little worse for the wear. Who cares, I thought, it can be the bottom layer.
After scraping the second round of cake mix into the pan, I shoved the whole mess in the refrigerator, turned off the oven, ran out the house and called Joelf to instruct him on how to bake the cake when he got home.
Annmarie and I experienced a great modern rock 'n' roll show by Death Cab for Cutie. It was at an outdoor venue on a lovely summer evening. It was great!
That night I came home to two baked red velvet cakes. I wrapped them both in lightly greased saran wrap (no easy task) and hit the hay.
Joelf took Friday off of work so that he could pack up most of the apartment to take with him to the beach (did I mention the party was at the beach?) and to help assemble the cake. We had decided to cut the cake into 3 parts: the guitar body, and the fret board in 2 pieces. I reminded Joelf that we needed to fill and layer the cake before cutting it, so I used about 1.5 pounds of frosting to make a thin layer, and he helped me flip the top layer onto the bottom one. I am telling you, these cakes were huge. Each layer was just about 2.25 inches high so when put together it was quite a tall cake. Just after we layered the cakes, I realised I forgot to level them off which I didn't think was too big of a deal; the top layer was fairly level to begin with.
While I was filling and layering, Joelf copied the guitar template onto paperboard. He free handed the drawings, as he needed to make them a little bigger than the graphic he had printed out. He then cut out the three pieces, laid them on the cake, and with a bread knife, began cutting the cake. His naturally OCD ways really come in handy with this type of work. With a careful, sawing motion he cut around his templates, and we piled the discarded cake on a plate as we pulled it free.
Within minutes we had three distinct pieces of an electric guitar-shaped red velvet cake on the table...and lots of discarded cake to munch on. We felt awesome. It looked so great! All we had left to do was frost it! No problem!
We frosted the top of the guitar body with untinted frosting. We had a plan, don't worry.
About this time we noticed that I had gone through almost a whole tub of frosting, just for the filling and the top of the guitar. We still had the 4.5 inch high sides to do, plus the top and sides of the fret board. Joelf and Wilman went back to the Decorette store for another 3 lb tub, and I got to work making red frosting.
I decided to use the KitchenAid to mix up the frosting with the food dye, and I am glad. Otherwise I would have thoracic outlet syndrome on both shoulders. It took pretty much the whole bottle of red food dye (there were two bottles of red food gel at the beginning of this story) to tint 3 cups of frosting a reddish color. I began frosting the sides of the guitar.
Frosting the sides of a wavy object is quite difficult. At this point I wished I had done a crumb coat and sat the cake in the refrigerator for a bit, as I was smearing crumbs all over the place. I finally discovered that if I left a thick amount of frosting between my spatula and the cake, the crumb smearing could almost be prevented. And anyway, the cake was red and so was the frosting; not a big deal.
I finally got the whole guitar body frosted, and I was thankful that this was the crusting kind of frosting as this kept the red and white frostings from smearing into one another at the top corners. Cookie, the crusty frosting enthusiast, will be getting a 3 lb tub of this stuff for Christmas.
On to the fret board. Only half of the fret board would fit with the body of the guitar on the full sheet board. The other end of the fret board was on the half sheet board, and would be transported separately. Joelf and I planned to bring all the leftover frosting with us so that we could slide the two halves together and patch them up with some frosting.
There was a small problem concerning the fret board and the guitar. The half that joined to the body of the guitar was leaning at a very serious angle, in fact we were afraid it would fall over entirely. This is when I wished I had leveled both cake layers. We tried to shove some cardboard under the edge that was tilting to right it, but as I began frosting the fret board (with tinted brown frosting) it began to fall towards the other side. What the hell, I thought, and pulled out the wedge. Who cares! Everybody is going to be impressed as it is, nobody will care that it is crooked!
Joelf also suggested we put a bunch of roses right at the join, to cover up how funny it looked. Agreed.
Small problem: we had placed large sheets of waxed paper underneath the cakes when we were flipping, filling, layering and cutting, and didn't bother to move them out before frosting. We were working right on the foil-lined cake boards and I didn't want a bunch of greasy frosting all over them, so I thought leaving the waxed paper would be great. Usually, I tuck in little strips of paper just under the edges to protect the work surface, but these big sheets were already there and so I didn't think anything of it. Except that, as I went to pull out the waxed paper, the cake started to come with it too leading to much cake tearing and a lot of swearing. The ECL cake tantrum began. I kept myself sort of in check, but I swore a lot and sent Joelf and Wilman away. (They were hovering. I can't handle that when I'm mad.)
Joelf, before I sent him packing (pun intended!) said to leave the paper and we'd just cut it off close to the edge of the cake. With a huff I told him he was doing that job.
I patched up the cake with more frosting (that stuff is like spackle!) and called Joelf for the fun part. We had decided to spray paint a lace pattern on the top of the guitar (for the Victorian part of Victorian rock 'n' roll). Joelf grabbed his lace square, laid it flush on the crusted white frosting, and spray painted away with the spray-on frosting. I wish we had black spray on frosting, but the pink was fine too. And it worked! Awesome.
I put the cakes in their boxes; Joelf and Wilman headed out to the coast. I laid on the couch to regroup.
At about 9:30 that night (3 or 4 hours later) I finally got myself, my stuff, and two giant cake boxes into the car and on the way to the beach. Everything went fine until I got into Lincoln City around 11:45, when two stupid dogs wandered into the road, causing me to slam on my bakes. As I did so, I heard a sliiiide and a thump from the cake boxes. Stupid dogs.
At the house we took a look at the cakes and they weren't too badly damaged. It was gonna be all right. Really.
The next day Joelf attached the two pieces of the fret board (with more spackle) while I made a bittersweet ganache (I made about 4x too much ganache, and sadly we never ate it). I piped 3 guitar strings (good enough) and lined the top edge of the cake (covering up the holes where the red and white frosting did or did not come together). Then I lined the bottom edge of the entire cake (covering up some of the waxed paper, but Joelf did a really good job cutting that and you really couldn't tell in most places).
Joelf borrowed a pair of (disinfected and clean) tweezers from Charlotte and he applied the silver dragees in lines across the fret board, and made a heart on the guitar.
Then he beheaded a bunch of red and white roses, which we scattered across the black foil. He took 3 roses and stuck them in the side of the cake to represent the tuning knobs. We covered up the weird join between the neck and the body with 3 roses and some baby's breath, and we were done.
Victorian rock 'n' roll cake? We kicked its ass.
People ooohed and ahhhhed appropriately when it was brought out (they moved the whole table instead of just the cake; good thinking). We made Scarlett and Hunter stand with it so that we could get pictures. They cut a corner and fed each other very respectfully. It was sweet. Then Joelf and his brother Dana kicked the kids out so that they could get to work plating and serving the cake to the 45 guests. Them boys are professionals.
I thought the red frosting was bitter from so much food dye, but all in all the cake was tasty in a box cake kind of way. The frosting was crusty and sweet, just like you would expect from store bought frosting. Good stuff, for sure, and certainly the way to go to save money and sanity. I couldn't imagine what sorts of ECL tantrums I would have had if I was doing this all from scratch. It wouldn't be pretty. But I do wonder how much better the cake and frosting could have been.
We ate through the entire fret board and about half of the body. People loved it. They wanted the recipe. They were really very kind.
Mkay...
June 28, 2007
Name of cake: Hey We Made a Guitar!
Occasion: Scarlett and Hunter Tied the Knot
Constituents: Two Half-Sheets of Red Velvet Cake, filled and frosted with vanilla "butter"cream frosting, cut and arranged in the shape of an electric guitar
First off, Joelf helped me with this project every step of the way. I couldn't have done it without his help, so thank you Joelf!! We are awesome!
Since the wedding theme was Victorian rock 'n' roll, the wedding colors were red and black, and the groom as well as the wedding and where they met and live is the South, it seemed obvious that the cake had to be red velvet.
I gave Joelf the task of finding a nice graphic of an electric guitar and printing it out--preferably as big as the cake would be. He found a pretty good photo that we needed to enlarge just a little bit, but it was good.
I hoofed it over to my favorite cake place, the Decorette shop, to buy a half sheet pan (12x18x2). The ladies over there may not be the friendliest ladies ever, but they sure are knowledgeable. My gruff lady helper reminded me that a full sheet pan wouldn't fit in my oven (I asked if they carried any), told me that the pan I was holding requires 3 boxes of mix and serves 80 people if we cut 1 inch by 2 inch slices.
Over the next few days we also bought from the Decorette store:
- three 3 lb tubs of "butter"cream frosting (I know--cheating! Yucky! But also: sanity!)
- spray-on pink frosting tint (like edible spray paint)
- one full sheet cardboard base
- one half-sheet cardboard base
- enough decorative black foil to cover both cardboard bases
- one full sheet cake box
- one half sheet cake box
- red food paste gel stuff
- brown food paste gel stuff
- small silver dragees
I also put Joelf on the task to round up a scrap piece of lace. More on that in a minute.
When the gruff lady told me that the pan would hold 3 boxes of mix, I thought about exactly how much cake batter I could possibly be creating from scratch...A LOT. That's a lot of potential ECL meltdowns. Since I already bought fake frosting, why not? Why not buy cake mix from a box??
So that's what I did--I bought 6 boxes of cake mix. And it was on sale!
However, nobody in Portland carries Red Velvet cake mix anymore. Luckily, I happened upon a copy of The Cake Mix Doctor while shopping and looked up Red Velvet cake...she suggested using a German Chocolate cake mix, and adding to it 1 cup sour cream, 1/4 cup oil, 1/2 cup water, 3 eggs, 1 bottle red food coloring, and 1 tsp vanilla extract. Excellent.
Joelf asked me to bake up the cakes on Thursday while he was at work and I wasn't. No problem!
I looked at my cute little KitchenAid and decided it was too small to mix all three boxes at once...so I mixed 2 boxes in one stage, moved it to another big bowl, mixed the last box, added it to the big bowl, and hand mixed in the food coloring. I wished for an electric hand mixer, because with one of those nifty appliances I could have mixed all 3 mixes plus the food coloring in one fell swoop in the big bowl and saved some time, plus some shoulder and arm pain. Oy, my aching shoulder!
Rose recommends baking a 12x18 pan for 35-45 minutes, so off the first layer went and I began to clean up. Annmarie and I were going to the Death Cab For Cutie show in about 90 minutes--I had to get the next round of cake mix ready and I was starting to panic about getting the cake done before I left for the show. I got all the ingredients readied for the second round and got myself ready too.
The first cake came out after about 40 minutes and I set it to cool. I suspected that with such a giant cake it would need more than 10 minutes to cool enough before it would be safe to take it out of the pan, but I wanted to get the second layer's batter in that freakin pan now. As soon as 10 minutes passed I hauled the cake out, and it didn't fall, but it certainly looked a little worse for the wear. Who cares, I thought, it can be the bottom layer.
After scraping the second round of cake mix into the pan, I shoved the whole mess in the refrigerator, turned off the oven, ran out the house and called Joelf to instruct him on how to bake the cake when he got home.
Annmarie and I experienced a great modern rock 'n' roll show by Death Cab for Cutie. It was at an outdoor venue on a lovely summer evening. It was great!
That night I came home to two baked red velvet cakes. I wrapped them both in lightly greased saran wrap (no easy task) and hit the hay.
Joelf took Friday off of work so that he could pack up most of the apartment to take with him to the beach (did I mention the party was at the beach?) and to help assemble the cake. We had decided to cut the cake into 3 parts: the guitar body, and the fret board in 2 pieces. I reminded Joelf that we needed to fill and layer the cake before cutting it, so I used about 1.5 pounds of frosting to make a thin layer, and he helped me flip the top layer onto the bottom one. I am telling you, these cakes were huge. Each layer was just about 2.25 inches high so when put together it was quite a tall cake. Just after we layered the cakes, I realised I forgot to level them off which I didn't think was too big of a deal; the top layer was fairly level to begin with.
While I was filling and layering, Joelf copied the guitar template onto paperboard. He free handed the drawings, as he needed to make them a little bigger than the graphic he had printed out. He then cut out the three pieces, laid them on the cake, and with a bread knife, began cutting the cake. His naturally OCD ways really come in handy with this type of work. With a careful, sawing motion he cut around his templates, and we piled the discarded cake on a plate as we pulled it free.
Within minutes we had three distinct pieces of an electric guitar-shaped red velvet cake on the table...and lots of discarded cake to munch on. We felt awesome. It looked so great! All we had left to do was frost it! No problem!
We frosted the top of the guitar body with untinted frosting. We had a plan, don't worry.
About this time we noticed that I had gone through almost a whole tub of frosting, just for the filling and the top of the guitar. We still had the 4.5 inch high sides to do, plus the top and sides of the fret board. Joelf and Wilman went back to the Decorette store for another 3 lb tub, and I got to work making red frosting.
I decided to use the KitchenAid to mix up the frosting with the food dye, and I am glad. Otherwise I would have thoracic outlet syndrome on both shoulders. It took pretty much the whole bottle of red food dye (there were two bottles of red food gel at the beginning of this story) to tint 3 cups of frosting a reddish color. I began frosting the sides of the guitar.
Frosting the sides of a wavy object is quite difficult. At this point I wished I had done a crumb coat and sat the cake in the refrigerator for a bit, as I was smearing crumbs all over the place. I finally discovered that if I left a thick amount of frosting between my spatula and the cake, the crumb smearing could almost be prevented. And anyway, the cake was red and so was the frosting; not a big deal.
I finally got the whole guitar body frosted, and I was thankful that this was the crusting kind of frosting as this kept the red and white frostings from smearing into one another at the top corners. Cookie, the crusty frosting enthusiast, will be getting a 3 lb tub of this stuff for Christmas.
On to the fret board. Only half of the fret board would fit with the body of the guitar on the full sheet board. The other end of the fret board was on the half sheet board, and would be transported separately. Joelf and I planned to bring all the leftover frosting with us so that we could slide the two halves together and patch them up with some frosting.
There was a small problem concerning the fret board and the guitar. The half that joined to the body of the guitar was leaning at a very serious angle, in fact we were afraid it would fall over entirely. This is when I wished I had leveled both cake layers. We tried to shove some cardboard under the edge that was tilting to right it, but as I began frosting the fret board (with tinted brown frosting) it began to fall towards the other side. What the hell, I thought, and pulled out the wedge. Who cares! Everybody is going to be impressed as it is, nobody will care that it is crooked!
Joelf also suggested we put a bunch of roses right at the join, to cover up how funny it looked. Agreed.
Small problem: we had placed large sheets of waxed paper underneath the cakes when we were flipping, filling, layering and cutting, and didn't bother to move them out before frosting. We were working right on the foil-lined cake boards and I didn't want a bunch of greasy frosting all over them, so I thought leaving the waxed paper would be great. Usually, I tuck in little strips of paper just under the edges to protect the work surface, but these big sheets were already there and so I didn't think anything of it. Except that, as I went to pull out the waxed paper, the cake started to come with it too leading to much cake tearing and a lot of swearing. The ECL cake tantrum began. I kept myself sort of in check, but I swore a lot and sent Joelf and Wilman away. (They were hovering. I can't handle that when I'm mad.)
Joelf, before I sent him packing (pun intended!) said to leave the paper and we'd just cut it off close to the edge of the cake. With a huff I told him he was doing that job.
I patched up the cake with more frosting (that stuff is like spackle!) and called Joelf for the fun part. We had decided to spray paint a lace pattern on the top of the guitar (for the Victorian part of Victorian rock 'n' roll). Joelf grabbed his lace square, laid it flush on the crusted white frosting, and spray painted away with the spray-on frosting. I wish we had black spray on frosting, but the pink was fine too. And it worked! Awesome.
I put the cakes in their boxes; Joelf and Wilman headed out to the coast. I laid on the couch to regroup.
At about 9:30 that night (3 or 4 hours later) I finally got myself, my stuff, and two giant cake boxes into the car and on the way to the beach. Everything went fine until I got into Lincoln City around 11:45, when two stupid dogs wandered into the road, causing me to slam on my bakes. As I did so, I heard a sliiiide and a thump from the cake boxes. Stupid dogs.
At the house we took a look at the cakes and they weren't too badly damaged. It was gonna be all right. Really.
The next day Joelf attached the two pieces of the fret board (with more spackle) while I made a bittersweet ganache (I made about 4x too much ganache, and sadly we never ate it). I piped 3 guitar strings (good enough) and lined the top edge of the cake (covering up the holes where the red and white frosting did or did not come together). Then I lined the bottom edge of the entire cake (covering up some of the waxed paper, but Joelf did a really good job cutting that and you really couldn't tell in most places).
Joelf borrowed a pair of (disinfected and clean) tweezers from Charlotte and he applied the silver dragees in lines across the fret board, and made a heart on the guitar.
Then he beheaded a bunch of red and white roses, which we scattered across the black foil. He took 3 roses and stuck them in the side of the cake to represent the tuning knobs. We covered up the weird join between the neck and the body with 3 roses and some baby's breath, and we were done.
Victorian rock 'n' roll cake? We kicked its ass.
People ooohed and ahhhhed appropriately when it was brought out (they moved the whole table instead of just the cake; good thinking). We made Scarlett and Hunter stand with it so that we could get pictures. They cut a corner and fed each other very respectfully. It was sweet. Then Joelf and his brother Dana kicked the kids out so that they could get to work plating and serving the cake to the 45 guests. Them boys are professionals.
I thought the red frosting was bitter from so much food dye, but all in all the cake was tasty in a box cake kind of way. The frosting was crusty and sweet, just like you would expect from store bought frosting. Good stuff, for sure, and certainly the way to go to save money and sanity. I couldn't imagine what sorts of ECL tantrums I would have had if I was doing this all from scratch. It wouldn't be pretty. But I do wonder how much better the cake and frosting could have been.
We ate through the entire fret board and about half of the body. People loved it. They wanted the recipe. They were really very kind.
That was quite a big project! I probably would have tried to talk them into a ukulele cake instead!
ReplyDeleteYou and Jolfe are very brave bakers.
It turned out pretty darn good too.
OMG, you are so brave! I found this very entertaining but I admire you for taking on such a challenge, those dogs should have had more sense than to walk in front of someone carrying a guitar shaped cake in their car,LOL Cheers, Jeannette
ReplyDeleteMelinda, a ukulele cake! That is funny.
ReplyDeleteJeanette, those dogs! Where were their owners anyway? Thanks for the compliment, but I think you are the brave one for taking that pastry class! Laminated pastry scares me :)
Well, ECL, we pretty much rock!!!!
ReplyDeleteWe do, Joelf! We do!
ReplyDeleteWow! wonderful rock web application
ReplyDelete